American special relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia blind us to their dreadful encroachments on human rights, as well as confer impunity on their leaders with respect to accountability for crimes against humanity.

There is no doubt that this fusion of terrorist and Muslim feeds virulent forms of Islamophobia, which is also encouraged by such incidents as the Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi and the Anglican Church bombing in Pakistan. 9/11 greatly intensified this tendency toward fusion, but it had also been nurtured by Israeli propaganda that portrayed their Palestinian and Arab adversaries as "terrorists." In fact, the US government approach after 9/11 was modeled in many of its features on Israeli tactics developed during the long occupation of Palestine.

In the Goldstone Report, Israeli perpetrators of possible crimes against humanity were made subject to prosecution and punishment, although the geopolitical leverage of the United States within the UN prevents implementation. At the same time, several African leaders are being prosecuted for their crimes against humanity and participation in genocide: a double standard of sorts, given the impunity accorded to the West and Israel.

As matters now stand, the combination of genocide, as conventionally understood, and crimes against humanity, seems sufficient to cover the criminality of political leaders, and the lethal consequences of totalising ideologies.

When I told my son that I had to give a talk about my work to non-mathematicians, he warned me that regular people don't think like mathematicians.

There was a deliberate decision after the failure of the League of Nations to make the next attempt to establish a global political actor sensitive to geopolitical realities. The underlying idea was to provide major states, defined in 1945 by reference to the winners in the Second World War (now an anachronism), with assurance that they could take part in the UN without jeopardising their national interests. In this regard, the UN has succeeded, as none of the big countries has withdrawn, and the Organisation has managed to achieve virtually universal membership of all sovereign states.

I can only hope that Trump comes to realize the grave dangers of adopting a policy of confrontation toward Iran. Among these dangers is the likelihood that hardliners would again gain the upper hand in the governing process in Tehran, and the moderates who have sought to end national and regional tensions would be marginalized, or worse.